1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information processing device, a print server, a print control system, a print control method and a computer readable recording medium.
2. Description of the Background Art
For producing printed outputs of materials such as a document, a printing rule registered in advance is applied in accordance with information contained in a print job and the printed outputs are produced based on the result of application of the printing rule. The printing rule defining print setting for each print purpose is registered in advance with print devices. This known technique is introduced for example in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. JP 2006-338237 A. According to the conventional technique, in response to receipt of the print job, the print device specifies the print purpose with template information contained in the print job. By applying the printing rule corresponding to the print purpose, the print device produces the printed outputs by configuring the print setting to print on both sides of a sheet (duplex printing) or print multiple pages on a single sheet (multiple pages per sheet printing).
The conventional printing rule applied at printing aims to reduce printing costs. To be more specific, according to the above-described conventional technique, the printing rule registered in advance with the print device automatically configures pages per sheet setting or duplex printing setting in response to the print purpose, which aims to cut back on the number of printed outputs.
A system comprising a print server and multiple image forming devices connected through a network is constructed in conventional environments such as offices. The system enables the print server to sort and output the print jobs to the respective image forming devices connected through the network. On this system, the print job generated in the network is just sent to the print server. The most conventional print servers are configured to output the print job received over the network to the image forming device designated in advance by the user who is the sender of the print job.
On the above-described system, the printing rule may be registered in advance with the print server in the years ahead. In this case, the printing rules registered in advance with the print server may be diverse in contrast with the conventional printing rules. Such diversified printing rules registered in advance may include a rule to determine the image forming device of the multiple image forming devices, for example, to which the print job is output or a rule to determine a user who is allowed to take the printed outputs produced as a result of execution of the print job. The print server applies the printing rule to the print job received over the network, thereby automatically determining which image forming device outputs the print job or the user who is allowed to take the printed outputs produced as the result of execution of the print job based on the printing rule. The print server is allowed to automatically determine and proceed with the process after receipt of the print job based on the printing rules.
The print server may apply the printing rule to determine and proceed with the later process corresponding to the print job. In this case, the user who gives an instruction to send the print job is not allowed to know how the process of the print job is proceeded after giving the instruction. Therefore, sometimes, the printed output is produced by the image forming device that the user who gives the instruction to send the print job does not expect, or the printed output is taken by the user that the user who gives the instruction to send the print job does not expect. Especially when the produced printed output as mentioned above contains confidential information, this involves a serious issue on security.